With the explosive growth of the World Wide Web in recent years, service providers have turned to the popular Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (“J2EE”) as a platform of choice for providing services. (Java™ is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.) Service providers may install applications on one or more J2EE application servers. Absent a standard for doing so, service providers often prepared custom and proprietary interfaces in order to monitor the status of the applications on the servers. Since each service provider provided a different way of doing so, confusion at the monitoring (or instrumentation layer) resulted.
One proposed solution to the confusion is the JSR 77 standard which specifies a standard set of interfaces that service providers (and others) will use to monitor services and applications and application providers will incorporate into their applications allowing them to be monitored. One approach to implementing the JSR 77 standard calls for deploying monitoring agents at each of the servers in order to collect the specified information.
However, monitoring agents can take up significant resources on the server systems on which the agents are deployed, adding overhead and reducing performance. Accordingly, what is needed are improved mechanisms and methods for implementing interfaces for managed applications.